I've tried Dwarf Fortress and I had some fun with it. In the beginning it felt impressive in many ways. There are so many little features and it's really cool with all the things (geography, history, religion, ...) which get generated. But after a while I somehow feel all the randomly generated stuff feels a bit hollow. I guess it's mainly because you generate an intricate world populated with people who display very little in terms of own motivations or agency.
It's difficult to tell a story when all the characters involved seem apathetic to actually partaking and shaping the story beyond going through their daily routines and doing what you tell them to do. Sure, rulers will demand a fancy office and issue a ban on the export of some random item and miserable dwarves go berserk. But that's about it.
There are still games which manage to create surprising experiences through emergent design, such as Dwarf Fortress. Even though one could analyze each piece in isolation without much difficulty, the interactions between all the pieces provide that sense of a complex world.